Microsoft to tune Windows 7 for SSD performance

In August, we learned that Samsung had teamed up with Microsoft to work on tuning Windows to improve performance with solid-state drives. CNet New now says Microsoft plans to reveal specifics about the SSD tweaks it's building into Windows 7 at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference later this week.

In a conference abstract titled "Windows 7 Enhancements for Solid-State Drives," Microsoft states that "PC systems that have solid-state drives are shipping in increasing volumes" and that it is planning "Windows enhancements that take advantage of the latest updates to standardized command sets, such as ATA."

"Windows7 will be able to identify a SSD uniquely," according to Gregory Wong of Forward Insights. Certain ATA commands will improve the speed that solid state drives write to disk, Wong said.

Microsoft also told CNet it will cover "file system optimizations" and "thoughts on the future of SSDs and their role in Windows," and it plans to discuss the use of flash storage in future Windows 7-powered netbooks. "We will explain how to calculate the lifetime of a flash-based netbook based on specific workload numbers," Microsoft's Leon Braginski noted in a statement.